Page 184 - Metropolitan Museum Collection September 2016

952
A LARGE FAMILLE ROSE BALUSTER JAR AND COVER

QIANLONG PERIOD (1736-1795)

The jar is fnely decorated on one side with a hunting scene with fgures on horseback accompanied by
attendants on foot, and on the other side with a battle scene depicting the legendary female general Mu
Guiying breaking the Heaven Gate Formation. Both scenes are separated by large blossoming branches,
above lappet and key-fret borders and beneath two bands of petal lappets around the shoulder. The cover is
similarly decorated.
31Ω in. (80 cm.) high
$30,000-50,000

PROVENANCE

Mr. and Mrs. Isaac D. Fletcher (d. 1917) Collection.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, accessioned in 1924.
The battle scene depicted on this jar features the female general Mu Guiying breaking the Heaven Gate
Formation, and is taken from the Ming dynasty (1368-1644) historical romance Yang Jia Jiang Yanyi
(Generals of the Yang Family). The story takes place during the war between the Northern Song
(960-1127) dynasty and its neighbors in the north, the Liao (Khitan) and the Xi Xia (Tangut). When
Yang Zongbao, the son of Yang Yanzhao and Princess Chai, besieged the Muke Fort in search of the
Dragon Subduing Wood, which would help in breaking the Liao army’s Heaven Gate Formation, he met
Mu Guiying, the daughter of the lord of Muke Fort. Mu Guiying fell in love with Yang Zongbao and
married him after capturing him and his father. Mu Guiying would prove instrumental in breaking the
Heaven Gate Formation with the rest of the Yangs. When Yang Yanzhao died, there were few males left
in the Yang family. Around that time, the Western Xia invaded the Song territories, and Yang Zongbao
had been killed in action, so the twelve women in the family participated in the campaign against the
Western Xia. Yang Zongbao’s hundred-year-old grandmother, She Saihua, along with Mu Guiying and
other widows of the Yang family, lead the Song army to resist the invaders. The female generals of the
Yang family proved that they were not inferior to their male counterparts, continuing the fruitful legacy
of loyalist generals in the Yang family.
清乾隆 粉彩加金彩穆桂英大破天門陣將軍罐
來源
Isaac D. Fletcher 伉儷珍藏。
紐約大都會藝術博物館，入藏於1924年。

(detail)

182